For John Arena, pizza making is a vocation that chose him as much as he’s chosen it.
Las Vegas’ preeminent pizzaiolo came to Las Vegas from New York City with his cousin Sam Facchini and they opened their first pizza shop in 1980. That venture eventually turned into Metro Pizza, and the third-generation pizzaiolo blew wide open the craft in this desert outpost, introducing Las Vegans to his family’s New York pizza traditions.
Metro Pizza, of course, is a local legend (seven locations and countless awards, metropizza.com) and now Arena has gone coastal—to Dana Point, specifically, opening Truly Pizza last year, a craft-focused artisanal pizzeria that evokes the Amalfi Coast and is blessed with the culinary bounty of California.
How Truly Pizza came about is a story of serendipity and lifelong friendship. In 1980, a high schooler named Donna Baldwin happened upon Arena’s pizza shop and loved it so much that she got a job there. They remained friends and she went on to a career in the hospitality industry at the Mirage and Bellagio, working for Steve Wynn. When she retired, she moved to California, but she never forgot those early days at Arena’s pizza shop.
“She called me one day and said, ‘Hey, you know we had a lot of fun working together in pizza business … let’s open up a pizzeria.’ And we did,” Arena says. “It’s been a dream. Donna is like a unicorn investor; she gave us all the resources that we needed to do something that was really special.
“Chris Decker and I, with the help of Michael Vakneen, collaborated on the food and Donna worked on the design and conceptualization, along with real estate developer Steve Muller. We worked on the menu together and it was two years before we actually got it open. It’s been a phenomenal success.”
Truly Pizza is the pizzeria for its location, just like Metro Pizza is the right pizzeria for Las Vegas, Arena says. He is guided by the philosophy of what a pizzeria can mean to a neighborhood, andBaldwin and Muller wanted something that their neighbors would love coming to.
“A pizzeria, if done correctly, is a gathering point and touchstone for families,” Arena says. “It’s a way of coming home; it reinforces the fact that you’re truly home wherever home is for you.”
Speaking of coming home, Arena will be the keynote speaker at the International Pizza Expo & Conference this year, taking place March 19-21 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. One of the topics he will be discussing is finding unwavering inspiration and motivation in the incredibly challenging restaurant industry. Arena has much to say on the issue, given the years he’s been at his craft.
“I try to remember the excitement I had the first time I made my first commercial pizza that got sold when I was 13,” he says. “I marveled at the fact that something I made with my hands was going to become someone’s meal. Every time I touch dough, now 56 years on, I still feel that excitement.
“But also, to be honest, I’m getting older and I have Parkinson’s disease, which slows me down a little, but not too much. What I try to do is think about the excitement I had when I made my first pizza and the reverence I would feel if it were my last.”
The craft of pizza making, in the end, is about change. Every slice is a singular expression and a reminder that, like the dough that Arena has shaped into countless pies, we are always evolving, inevitably so.
“People will come into the pizzeria sometimes and they’ll say, ‘Oh your pizza is different today than it was last week or last year. My pizza is different from even an hour ago. That’s because it’s alive and it’s changing and it’s evolving. But more than that, I’m changing. The next time I make a pizza, I’ll be a slightly different person. The next time you eat a pizza, you’ll be a slightly different person,” he says. “Everything we do, by its very nature, is a one-off, including this conversation.”
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